Monday, October 06, 2014

Shadow of Revan

Bioware unveiled the latest (real) expansion for The Old Republic today: Shadow of Revan.

Contents

SoR is a normal expansion, with a 5 level cap increase, new storyline and leveling zones, and new flashpoints and operations. As well, buying SoR automatically gets you Rise of the Hutt Cartel. It's a good idea to bundle all the expansions together.

Revan himself is interesting as a focus for the story. There are a lot of complaints of "too much Revan" in TOR, but realistically, he doesn't appear all that much. There's a handful of quests devoted to the Revanite cult at about level 15, and then about 4 flashpoints (2 Republic, 2 Empire) in the mid-30s. It's just indicative of how popular KOTOR was, and much weight Revan exerts on the Old Republic part of the Star Wars franchise.

I think this will be a good story line and am looking forward to it.

Disciplines

The other major news is that TOR is following in the footsteps of WoW and getting rid of the talent trees. I do like their layout showing you the upcoming abilities. As well, their utility pools are interesting. TOR has fewer pools of choices, but you can choose multiple abilities from each tier.

I think TOR is doing a better job of making sure that something happens every level, be it a discipline ability or a utility choice.

I don't know if they are keeping trainers and ability ranks. If they do, that should also contribute to making gaining power at each level obvious.

For reference, I talked about the flaws and benefits of talent trees here and here.

Pre-order Perk

The pre-order perk for subscribers is interesting. It gives you a 12x bonus to experience from class quests until the expac launch. This means that you could level a character to max solely by doing the class story line. A lot of people do not like repeating the world and side quests on each character. This avoids that and makes leveling alts much easier.

I'm not too sure I want this perk personally. I find it fun doing all the quests with a different character, and seeing the different responses tailored for each class. But there's no denying that this perk would make it easier to see the last few story lines.

This perk is an interesting spin on WoW's automatic level 90s. Because the class storyline is so important to TOR, the game can't really just boost a character to max. This is a good compromise.

Conclusions

All in all, the expansion looks pretty good. I am looking forward to it.